New Editor Ability: Place city names

We all know the problem: We have made a map of the world, Europe or somewhere else, we place some civs and give them a city list. Everything looks excactly like the real world. But after only a few turns, Spain builds Barcelona in France, cities like Newport and Long Beach are as far away from the ocean as possible etc. etc.
The solution? Pre-placement of city names in the editor.
With this new ability, it will be possible to make sure that a city built on a certain square will always be called the same. This will render city lists obsolete and make sure that London is always placed by the Thames, Madrid is always in central Spain and Moscow won't be a coastal city.

Could be cool in a world map, but is it really worth the Firaxi teams effort and ressources to implement this? And isnt it a point that each CIV has its own specific city names based on history! A little bit Strange if the Zulus start in Europe, their capital is Paris, and no of they other cities have african names....

This would be useful in concept for pre-planned scenarios/maps, but useless for the epic game.

Let's say we are using the world map. What happens if the AI decides that one tile from London is a better place to settle? What name would it get? London, also? How about two tiles? Still London? What if the English settle in Sweden? What name does the city get? An English on or a Swedish one? When the English settled in America, most of their cities were named English names. Same when the Spanish colonized the Americas.

Would the map maker need to give a name to every tile on the map? That sounds like a lot of work to me. If it was optional, what name would unnamed tiles get if they are settled?

What if Civ4 does away with tiles?

It's true that it wouldn't work for the standard epic game. The use of pre-placed city names were supposed to be and option in the editor.
I agree that there are major problems with this idea when using a map of a large area. But actually I got the idea while making a mod of a much, much smaller area (try the link in my signature). In my mod, which only includes one nation from the real world (parted in 10 civs - it wouldn't be fun with just one nation in a game), it doesn't really matter who build which cities. This makes pre-placed city names very useful to me, but I don't think there would be many others, who could use it.

I agree with Juul. I had this idea too. On a world map it really sucks when AI puts cities in the wrong places. One way out of this is to pre-place cities in historic locations in the Editor. (I just learned how to do this).

Assigning every tile on the map with a name, in case a city gets founded there was my idea also. I don't know if that can be done, but it would be nice.

Let's see, 362x362 tiles = 131044 tiles. Let's say it's an average water map. This is only 39000 tiles that you would have to name (assuming you don't name water). On the upside, it would only be about an extra megabyte's worth of data.

Of course, a standard map would only require ~3000 named tiles.

I know when I'm making historical scenarios I'd like the ability to have the ai build cities in historical locations, this is the way I wold implement it using the civ3 editor as the example:
I'd have an overlay similar to Start Location, you place these "City Locations" in the places you want the historical cities to be built. Then during the game, the ai civ must build these cities first before it is allowed to go off an build its own cities hwerevr it likes. By default each "city location" corresponds to the City List, thus the first city would default to Athens, the next one to Sparta, etc

Mr. Grinch said:

I know when I'm making historical scenarios I'd like the ability to have the ai build cities in historical locations, this is the way I wold implement it using the civ3 editor as the example:
I'd have an overlay similar to Start Location, you place these "City Locations" in the places you want the historical cities to be built. Then during the game, the ai civ must build these cities first before it is allowed to go off an build its own cities hwerevr it likes. By default each "city location" corresponds to the City List, thus the first city would default to Athens, the next one to Sparta, etc

Click to expand...

Gameplay wise, this is too easy to exploit. The player would know where the AI will build. What happens if the player builds (or places a unit) in that spot before the AI gets to it? Will the AI not build other cities because even 1 pre-determined city wasn't built? Although, you could do this with a script....

In fact, you could probably take that one step further and mimic actual roads and production.

Again, while that seems great in theory (a simulation), it's not good for a strategy game. Especially when you consider that the player can mess up the AI's work.

don't name individual tiles, make each name have an area of effect on the map.
only have it use these names if it's the right civ setteling there
a name is only used once

so if you have a world map and the americans put a city near New York, it gets called New York, if the Chinese put one there call it something Chinese, taken from the "chinese cities" list and not the "predetermined chinese cities" list.

this way the names and ownership stay asclose to this history as events in the game will allow

what you think?

warpstorm said:

Let's see, 362x362 tiles = 131044 tiles. Let's say it's an average water map. This is only 39000 tiles that you would have to name (assuming you don't name water). On the upside, it would only be about an extra megabyte's worth of data.

Of course, a standard map would only require ~3000 named tiles.

Click to expand...

This feature would not be that complicated to be introduced.
All you would have to do is to locate the spot where London (to stay with this example) has to be located. Then you drag and drop that tile into the city list in the editor. The engine automatically determines the x-y-coordinates and assignes them to a slot: "<name city> x,y"
As soon as you would found a city, the engine would check in the list whether those coordinates have been pre-named. If not, one of the "free" names (Littleton, Ft. Brown, whatever) is taken. Otherwise the appropriate name is used.
This way, you even avoid to confuse the engine if a given city momentarily cannot be placed and you decide to place another city at another location, first.
As there are only a limited number of "real world cities" (I would assume, the number would be less than 100) which would be used in a scenario, even on a huge map, the effort would be manageable.

I'd like to see this included as an option. I think the ZOC for the city name, as Suki suggested would be the best idea. Of course, it would only work on World Maps, but moddable to other maps.
Aside from that, when you enable the option, it assigns city lists to area, instead of ot the civ. if the option was not turned on then the city list would be assigned to the civ... Voila

Assigning every tile on the map with a name, in case a city gets founded there was my idea also. I don't know if that can be done, but it would be nice.[/QUOTE]

I've had a long-time gripe with names of cities in "wrong" locations. A simple solution might be ... just allow the human player the option to re-name any AI city on the map at any time, just as you can re-name your own cities. I don't know how to do this, but it should be quite easy to set up as one of the "Options". You wouldn't have to pre-name every land square on the map. You could just put whatever name you want on any existing AI city whenever you want. The AI doesn't care: it's just exchanging one label for another.

I was a little surprised/annoyed when I saw that somebody had bumped this thread after 1&#189; years. But then I discovered that I shouldn't be because it was for a very good reason: Your idea is great, opus95!
Not only can it be used for giving cities the right names it can also be used to "insult" the AI by giving their cities strange names.

JuuL said:

I was a little surprised/annoyed when I saw that somebody had bumped this thread after 1½ years. But then I discovered that I shouldn't be because it was for a very good reason: Your idea is great, opus95!
Not only can it be used for giving cities the right names it can also be used to "insult" the AI by giving their cities strange names.

Click to expand...

Thank you, Juul.

I'm not even sure how I found the thread...I thought I was adding to a current one I saw in the "Ideas and suggestions" list. Anyway, my solution seems like it would be quite simple to implement by Firaxis. All that might me necessary, and helpful for many civs, is to have a list provided for us of many typical names from each particular civ.

Opus95

Rhye's earth simulator mod uses an accurate city naming system that appropriately names each city based on their location and civilization. Check it out under Develeping Mods for Civ IV.